Marc Rich

Marc Rich (born Marcell David Reich; December 18, 1934 – June 26, 2013) was an international commodities trader, financier, and businessman.

He founded the commodities company Glencore, and was later indicted in the United States on federal charges of tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and making oil deals with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis.

He fled to Switzerland at the time of the indictment and never returned to the United States.

He received a widely criticized presidential pardon from President Bill Clinton, on his last day in office; Rich's ex-wife Denise had made large donations to the Democratic Party.

Rich was born in 1934 to a Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium.

In 1941 his parents emigrated with their son to the United States to escape the Nazis.

They traveled via Vichy France, Spain, Portugal, and the liner Serpa Pinto.

His father opened a jewelry store in Kansas City, Missouri, then moved the family to Queens, New York City in 1950, where he started a company that imported Bengali jute to make burlap bags, and later started a business trading agricultural products and helped found the American Bolivian Bank (Banco Boliviano Americano S.A).

Rich attended high school at the Rhodes Preparatory School in Manhattan.

He later attended New York University, but dropped out after one semester to work for Philipp Brothers (now known as Phibro LLC) in 1954 where he worked with Pincus Green.

At Philipp Brothers, he eventually became a dealer in metals, learning about the international raw materials markets and commercial trading with poor, third world nations.

He helped run the company's operations in Cuba, Bolivia, and Spain.

Nicknamed "the King of Oil" by his business partners, Rich was said to have expanded the spot market for crude oil in the early 1970s, drawing business away from the larger established oil companies that had relied on traditional long-term contracts for future purchases.

As Andrew Hill of the Financial Times put it, "Rich's key insight was that oil – and other raw materials – could be traded with less capital, and fewer assets, than the big oil producers thought, if backed by bank finance. It was this leveraged business model that became the template for modern traders, including Trafigura, Vitol, and Glencore".

His tutelage under Philipp Brothers afforded Rich the opportunity to develop relationships with various dictatorial régimes and embargoed nations.

Rich would later tell biographer Daniel Ammann that he had made his "most important and most profitable" business deals by violating international trade embargoes and doing business with the apartheid regime of South Africa.

He also counted Fidel Castro's Cuba, Marxist Angola, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania, and Augusto Pinochet's Chile among the clients he serviced.

According to Ammann, "he had no regrets whatsoever.... He used to say 'I deliver a service. People want to sell oil to me and other people wanted to buy oil from me. I am a businessman, not a politician.'"

In 1974, he and co-worker Pincus Green set up their own company in Switzerland, Marc Rich + Co. AG, which would later become Glencore Xstrata Plc.

Later, following the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Rich used his special relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, to buy oil from Iran despite the American embargo.

According to Forbes Magazine, Asadollah Asgaroladi was also the secret business partner of Rich in helping bypass U.S. sanctions against Iran after the Iranian revolution.

Iran would become Rich's most important supplier of crude oil for more than 15 years.

Rich sold Iranian oil to Israel through a secret pipeline.

Due to his good relationship with Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini, Rich helped give Mossad's agents contacts in Iran.

His real estate company, Marc Rich Real Estate GmbH, was involved in large developer projects (e.g., in Prague, Czech Republic).

Rich and Marvin Davis bought 20th Century Fox in 1981.

Due to the indictment filed against Rich for violating U.S. trade sanctions against his deals with Iran while Rich was living in Switzerland, his assets including his holding in 20th Century Fox were frozen.

In 1983, Rich and partner Pincus Green were indicted on 65 criminal counts, including income tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and trading with Iran during the oil embargo (at a time when Iranian revolutionaries were still holding American citizens hostage).

The charges would have led to a sentence of more than 300 years in prison had Rich been convicted on all counts.

The indictment was filed by then-U.S. Federal Prosecutor (and future mayor of New York City) Rudolph Giuliani.

At the time, it was the biggest tax evasion case in U.S. history.

Learning of the plans for the indictment, Rich fled to Switzerland and, always insisting that he was not guilty, never returned to the U.S. to answer the charges.

Rich's companies eventually pleaded guilty to 35 counts of tax evasion and paid $90 million in fines, although Rich himself remained on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most-Wanted Fugitives List for many years, narrowly evading capture in Britain, Germany, Finland, and Jamaica.

Davis was permitted by authorities to purchase Rich's holding and subsequently sold this to Rupert Murdoch for $232 million during March 1984.

Rich had ties to many mafia associates in the Soviet Union and, subsequently, the former Soviet Union, such as the Georgian-Israeli Grigori Loutchansky who owns the Austrian-based oil exporting company Nordex and who was involved in the Iridium satellite constellation, and especially in the Russian Mafia, such as Marat Balagula, who was convicted of gasoline price fixing.

Business Insider reported Rich had an estimated net worth of US$2.5 billion.

Leonard Garment, Richard Nixon's acting Special Counsel who had replaced John Dean during Watergate, had both Rich and Rich's business partner Pincus Green as a client since spring 1985 with Scooter Libby representing them as their attorney for the pardon until spring 2000 when Jack Quinn became their attorney.

Several of Clinton's strongest supporters distanced themselves from the decision.

Fearing arrest, he did not even return to the United States to attend his daughter's funeral in 1996.

On January 20, 2001, hours before leaving office, U.S. President Bill Clinton granted Rich a controversial presidential pardon.